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TURIN SHROUD MAN IS NOT JESUS CHRIST
A CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY BOOKLET
REVIEWED
The Turin Shroud is the most famous relic in the
world. Millions believe that it is the
burial cloth of Jesus Christ bearing his crucified and bloodied image. The cloth is kept at
THE NT AND THE SHROUD
If the Shroud of Turin existed in New Testament times it would have been mentioned in the New Testament. The writers had to contend with flesh-haters who insisted that Jesus was a spirit, an immaterial being and not a man. Yet the only weapon they employed against them was their testimony. If they had the Shroud they could have used that and written about it for hard evidence is better than testimony.
If the apostles were afraid to use the Shroud as ammunition against heretics in case something would happen to it then that says a lot about their confidence in Jesus. It would be ascribing incompetence and stupidity to him – hardly consistent with their being the witnesses appointed by God to identify Jesus as being the saviour and Messiah. There are countless ways in which you can avoid harm coming to a relic and still let enough people know of its existence.
In John 19:40 we read that Jesus was prepared for burial according to the Jewish custom.
The John gospel tells us how Lazarus was laid out in strips of cloth and with a bare face. This was a gospel meant for non-Jews. Jews would find it too hostile to their leaders and religion to even want to read it. The author then by telling us about how Lazarus was clothed in the tomb and how Jesus was anointed and so on was explaining what he meant by the Jewish burial custom. Jesus' face was bare in the tomb. Therefore the Turin Shroud is a fake.
Washing was part of the custom. The Shroud man was not washed so he was not Jesus. Plus the anointings and spices would have mingled with his dried blood and sweat stains making excessively messy and greasy marks which is exactly what we do not have on the Shroud. There should have been a lot of smearing as Jesus was eased into the cloth. If he were plastered in spices as John says then he would have been sticky.
The Bible says that the resurrection is the most important thing Jesus did. If God were giving us a miraculous image of Jesus it would be a miraculous picture of Jesus’ corpse transforming into the glorious and perfected Christ and something that was a complete mystery to science. The Turin Shroud is Genuine states that there is nothing miraculous about the Shroud though certain things can’t be worked out about it (page 130). Inexplicable is not miraculous. There are billions of odd things we cannot explain and that does not entitle us to hail them as miracles.
THE
SECOND FACE
In 2004, it was found that there is another face on the Shroud. It is on the other side of the existing face as if something had seeped through to the back of the cloth. The view that something did seep back is rejected for like the existing face it just sits on the top fibres and doesn’t penetrate. The new face can be barely seen. It is nothing like as plain as the face on the front.
We must ask why just the face?
Again it shows the maker of the cloth was most interested in the face and worked harder with it. This suggests intentional creation.
Is this new face different from the front one?
Incredibly enough it is!
Professor Giulio Fanti of
The researchers deny that the cloth is a miracle. They say the image has chemical properties. The idea that the image was not touched to a body but made using body substances seems to have eluded them. For example, maybe the shroud was printed using a bas relief and body fluids? After all it was supposed to contain emissions from the body of Christ. This method of making the cloth might have resulted in strange chemical changes and we all know there are strange chemical changes that have taken place on the cloth.
Compare the two negative images – the negative is the clearest.
You will see that the bloodstain on the forehead in both that is shaped like a 3 is clear. So this means that the blood seeped through. But it didn’t. This indicates trickery no matter how strange this is. It should have seeped through. Why did that stain show on the other side when the bloodstained beard is so faint on the second face and so clear in the first? It makes no sense. The hair with the blood on it is actually plainer on the second face than anything else indicating that the hair image was put on by a separate process. It was put on separately ergo the cloth is a forgery.
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Hairline corresponds. This is particularly noticeable on the left side of the faces (your left).
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Eyebrows curve visibly in the second image. In first image, the eyebrow on left side of face is higher than eyebrow on the right and the other eyebrow doesn’t appear at all.
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Right side of face is darker in the second image. The darker region extends downward from the hairline, along the nose on the left, to the top of the moustache. Correspondingly the left side of the face is lighter. In the first image this darkening doesn’t show up at all. The 3 mark appearing in it and other bloodier areas not appearing is suspicious.
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In the first image (it’s a negative too), a dark cross-like shape is visible midway horizontally and about two-thirds of the way down from the top. This cross corresponds exactly with the tip of the nose in the front side image where it is absent. The early Christian symbol was the fish not the cross and a cross points to forgery.
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The bright spot in the middle of the backside image (filtered out in figure 5 above), corresponds with an apparent protrusion on the nose just below eye level.
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In the first image the crease that passed through the beard is barely visible on the bottom edge. In the front image a forked beard that starts just above the crease is very evident. There is some indication of the fork in the backside image exactly where it is expected.
The differences in the two faces indicate that the shroud is a fake. Whatever technique was used to make the Shroud even if it was inexplicable was not a miracle.
NO DECOMPOSITION
The Shroud of Turin image shows no signs that it contained
a decomposing body. Jesus was buried
for nearly three days and bodies decomposed fast in the
Jesus’ blood should have decomposed a bit. He wasn’t going to resurrect it for there
is no flesh and blood in the
Bodies in
THE SHROUD MAN WAS NOT
JESUS
If the Shroud is real then it does not depict Jesus Christ and we can be fully certain of this. We have already seen that it does not tally with the crucifixion of Jesus and other things. When the Jesus records are opposed to the Shroud they take pre-eminence because unlike the Shroud they tell us about a Jesus and can be proven to be the nearest records to Jesus’ time which can’t be said of the Shroud. The gospels have to tell us about Jesus before we can know the Shroud is him.
What makes the Christians believe the Shroud man is Jesus when they believe in stigmatists, people who bear the marks of Christ’s cruel death by the power of God? The Shroud man could be an unknown stigmatist who had gone through a beating that dislocated some of his joints. The Shroud man could be another Jesus. He could be a more convincing one if it is true that the Shroud indicates resurrection from the dead. He would be proof that it is mad to believe in any resurrections or Messiahs for they claim to be the only saviours and yet there is no reason to favour one above the other.
If it is true that the cloth did originate in the time Jesus allegedly lived then perhaps it was the weapon the likes of Paul and some others used to verify that the risen Jesus they saw in their visions was a real person though nobody else thought so. Perhaps the Christian tradition was made to fit the Shroud and inspired by it.
The man’s face is serene which indicates that it is not the face of one tortured to death. It is not true that you have to look peaceful when you die. It is argued that this is the face of a man awaking from the sleep of death. Christians believe that Jesus became something of a shape-shifter that could behave like a ghost so this waking idea has Jesus reviving the body before he transforms it. Not likely or necessary. Also there is no evidence that the man is meant to give the impression that he is waking from death.
Some would say there should be blurs about the mouth showing that the man breathed. But if he were in a coma his breath would have been imperceptible. And the occasional strong breath would not affect the image if it were slow forming.
The Shroud man is alleged to
have dislocated arms which makes them look abnormally long (page 43, The
Holy Shroud and Four Visions).
Some say the overstretched limbs are just errors in the production of
the image. If dislocation has taken
place then it shows that the Shroud was forged after visionaries like St
Bridget of
The gospels say that Jesus was dead when taken off the cross but the Shroud man was not dead because he bled in the Shroud.
Jesus was so busy preaching,
hiding and praying according to the gospels that he could not have had the
muscular physique of the Shroud man.
He said he had nowhere to lay his head and went out without taking
food with him. He had no food when he
multiplied the loaves and fishes. You
need to live a healthy life and eat five or six protein based snacks a day to
develop muscle as well as spending hours working out. The
Don’t blame the scourging for that. All who were to be crucified had to be scourged first. The Romans did not want the embarrassment of getting Simon of Cyrene to help Jesus and it was planned for the criminal to carry it all the way. And the purpose of Jesus’ crucifixion was to humiliate him so the Romans could not have scourged him too much in case he would die prematurely. Jesus’ scourging would not have been that severe because it was not a prelude to crucifixion if Pilate planned to save his life according to the gospels. The fact that the man on the cloth shows over 100 lashes of a scourge that made holes in the body and took lumps of flesh with it indicates that he suffered more than the real Jesus would have. He was not Jesus Christ.
Revelation 1.13 describes Jesus appearing in a vision with paps or mastos (a Greek word). Paps or mastos was rarely used of men unless they had feminine breasts (page 211, The Pagan Christ). It described the breasts of women. Jesus then suffered was thought to have suffered from a condition that gives men breasts like women. Christians will answer that the vision was symbolic and there is some symbolism in the vision’s appearance. But would a Christian describe Christ in such a way if it were not true? The breasts were mentioned to convince readers that the vision was really of Jesus. They have no symbolic significance because they are mentioned in a passing way – like something that didn’t need to be said. The Shroud man did not have breasts that looked feminine.
The hair is long. Would
The BBC program Son of God shown at Easter 2001 said it was universally accepted that the style of short hair among men was uniform in Jesus’ time and long after for fashions changed slowly.
The Bible calls Jesus a Nazarene which some take to mean Nazarite and Nazarites were not allowed to cut their hair at all (Numbers 6:5). So the Shroud man’s long hair would mean he could be Jesus. But Jesus may have been a Nazarite temporarily in accordance with Numbers 6:5 or he may have called himself a Nazarene but followed his own rules about what he thought this meant so he might not have been recognised officially as one. Jesus would have been more interested in the spiritual side of being a Nazarene and knowing him he would have cut his hair in defiance of the rule that it should be cut.
Some say that Jesus was always
called the Nazarite implying that he was a permanent one. The gospels say he was called that because
he came from the town of
There is just no reason to believe that Jesus had long hair at the time he was crucified. Had he been a Nazarite his hair would have been grown back at that time.
The Shroud man’s hair at the back was laid out perfectly and it tapered into a point at the bottom. Why would the people who buried Jesus have been so careful with his hair? This indicates that the image was intended for display and was not the real Shroud. If the head were cut off as many things indicate, it would have been more likely for the hair to be laid out properly before the body was laid in the Shroud.
The hair and the beard hang down as if the man was standing up in the shroud. The hair would not be doing that if the man were lying down and the beard would have been pushed against the chin and throat under the weight of the cloth but it hangs down straight as it would if Jesus were standing erect. The beard is just too tidy as well. The Christians object that the hair and beard were stiff with dried blood so they stayed in the position they were in when he was upright on the cross. But the hair is still too straight for Jesus would have hung his head down at times and rested it on the left shoulder and on the right shoulder which would change the way the hair would set. And the hair on the Shroud man just has specks of blood on it and is not matted with blood. Close up the hairs look mostly clean. They look like they don’t have a crusted total cover of blood over them and as if they had been saturated with blood. The lies the Christians tell to support the Shroud are truly tiresome. The hair proves the man on the cloth was not Jesus Christ.
The excuse for the hair hanging down is conclusively disproved by the fact that the hair was laid out and tapered at the back and tidied up. This manipulating of the hair showed that it would have been made manageable. Those who buried the man were anxious to have his hair right. They were not the burial party of the gospels who buried Jesus nearby for they were in a hurry as the day of rest was imminent. If the Shroud man was buried, he was buried by people who had plenty of time.
The blood would have been washed out of the hair by the heavy rain gushing out of the heavens when Jesus was on the cross. The gospels say there was climatic upheaval at that time such as earthquakes and darkness so we can safely infer that if we asked the gospellers if there was rain they would say there was. The blood blots around the head are not watery from the rain at all which adds weight to the cloth being a forgery. The hair would have been tossed by the wind. It is just too tidy as is the beard.
The positive image of the Shroud when it is photographed demonstrates that the man had white hair and a white beard (page 18, Sceptical Inquirer, Vol 25, No 5). Yet the gospels say Jesus was a Jew meaning his hair would have been dark and died when he was in his early thirties. Parts of the hair and beard are darker than the body meaning they must have been a very light colour or white (page 184-5, The Divine Deception). If the hair was lightened with chalk powder that would indicate forgery.
The height of the man which is about six feet is thought to indicate that he could not have been Jesus for people were short in those days. But the remains of long-dead people that tall exist and refute this argument. Edward 1 of England was the same height as the Shroud-man. Magdalene said in John that she could carry Jesus by herself so Jesus was a tiny man. This man is too big. Jesus was supposedly born into a poor family and had to work hard and had a lot of stress. It is likely that in this poverty he would have had stunted growth. When many people believed that Jesus was John the Baptist (Luke 9:19) and when John lived on locusts and wild honey (Matthew 3:4) Jesus would have looked very emaciated. Jesus was able to survive for long periods without food which may indicate anorexia but certainly shows he was not used to food. He applied Isaiah 53 to himself though that chapter describes a man called the servant growing up like a shoot out of parched earth who has nothing attractive about his appearance and has no stately bearing. A shoot that comes out of parched earth looks burned and weak. Jesus hinted that he was weak and sickly. The chapter says that the man was familiar with suffering so he probably had a lifelong ailment. The early Church applied the chapter to Jesus too and it was their favourite prediction from the Old Testament about Jesus. This proves they had no image like that of the Turin Shroud. The early Church and the apostles applied Isaiah 53 to Jesus showing that if they had a cloth with a muscled and strong Jesus on it there was only one thing it could be – a fake. Isaiah 53 says that as the people were shocked at the servant not looking human at all so they will be astonished at him in future. This shows that extreme suffering and disfigurement belonged to the subject. Now the people who seen Jesus nailed up didn’t see anything to shock them – they were used to seeing criminals on crosses for days with the sun peeling their skin off and the birds plucking at them and eating their eyes out. But Jesus only suffered three hours. And the Shroudman didn’t have great disfigurement. Jesus died on the cross so soon that Pilate was amazed at it according to the Mark gospel. Though Pilate had known of thousands of crucifixion victims some of whom would have died quickly Jesus must have died exceptionally quickly. It would mean that the gospels lied about the length of time Jesus suffered on the cross. Perhaps Jesus may have been very small and weak by nature so that he couldn’t stand up to the sufferings of the cross.
The body is very muscular. This has been verified in Ian Wilson’s The Blood and the Shroud. But the face is emaciated. http://www.skepticalspectacle.com explains that it is an optical illusion caused by the way the cloth was bleached! But it could be that the face was imperfectly put on with a lot of the face missing from the image. The hair was then put on leaving a very wide gap between the face and the hair. But if you look at the picture of the Shroud you see that the face is indeed gaunt. It is not an illusion. The face is unnaturally thin and long. The high thin cheekbones should be shown to the hairline. They are not. The face should be shown better than the hair for the face was nearer the cloth while the hair should be flattened out and further away. The hair is also too tidy. Would the buriers of Jesus have fussed with the hair of a corpse and when they were in a hurry to get away for the feast was nigh? The face doesn’t go with the muscular body. Body building affects the face and fills it out. The man could not have been Jesus for not only is the head separate from the body it doesn’t even belong to the body!
The earliest Christian descriptions of Jesus stated that he was a small man with a deformed back. The back problems were probably believed to have come from using bad posture when he was a carpenter. The early Christian apologist and writer Tertullian who died about 225 AD declared that Jesus did not have a normal human shape.
In Luke 4, Jesus went to preach
in the synagogue of
Some say that his use of the proverb, ‘Physician heal yourself’, does not refer to Jesus having some grave sickness or deformity but to the fact that he wasn’t healing his own in Nazareth but was in other places. But Luke was writing for non-Jews who wouldn’t have understood that usage. They would have taken it to refer to Jesus himself. When Luke didn’t indicate that it meant anybody other than Jesus, Jesus was who it meant. The words have to refer to a doctor who heals others but not himself.
After saying “Physician heal
yourself,” Jesus immediately went on to say, “You will be saying that I must
do in my own country the things that we have heard you do in
There can be no doubt that the Shroud man was a different person from Jesus Christ.
The Church universally believed from early days that Jesus was washed for burial (page 6, The Blood and the Shroud). This shows that if the Church had the Shroud it knew that the unwashed man in it was not Jesus Christ. Or it might show that the Shroud never existed at that time meaning that the man still had no chance of being Jesus Christ.
The face of the man on the Shroud looks human while the earliest Christians applied Isaiah’s alleged predictions of Jesus to Jesus and they said the servant’s face would be marred so much that it would look no longer like the face of a man. This indicates that the early Church would have rejected the Shroud as not being a true Christian relic.
If you look at the print of the Shroud-man’s hands you will notice that there is a hand with a nail wound with unnaturally long and thin fingers that covers the other hand that is far more ridiculously elongated. The visibly wounded hand is bent a little over the other and that is the only reason it looks shorter but it still looks too long. If you act as if you are looking at a distorted image and mentally picture the hands as being normal you will see that the so-called wrist wound really came through the back of the hand through the palm without the nail penetrating at an angle. Jesus would have been nailed through the wrist and the wrist wound of the Shroud-man is simply an illusion caused by some kind of distortion. Plus even if the wound is at the wrist then that still does not prove the forger of the Shroud believed that the Romans crucified through the wrists because the nail might have been put through the palm at an angle so the point comes out near the wrist.
The Shroud man has been whipped with savagery beyond belief. If Pilate liked Jesus according to the gospel Jesus’ scourging would not have been as bad as that. This shows that the Shroud of Turin is inconsistent with the gospels and is the image of a man posing as Jesus not Jesus. The Shroud also contradicts the gospels that Jesus was well-known and so popular that he had to be arrested in secret in case the people would rebel for if Pilate released Jesus as he planned to do and Jesus was presented as excessively scourged and scarred to his fans there would be huge trouble. Pilate, according to the gospels, never expected the crowd to reject Jesus.
And the Shroud man wore a cap of thorns. A cap is harder to make than a circlet. Roman soldiers had enough to do without the painful and time-consuming job of making a cap.
The Shroud man was made to look as if he bled afresh round the head just before being put in the cloth as if the crown of thorns had just been pulled off. Now the real Jesus if he was popular and if he had royal blood would have been crucified privately for crucifying him publicly with a crown of thorns on his head would have been provocative and asking for an uprising and Pilate was expected to keep the peace by the Emperor at least in the later stage of his being governor. It would represent Roman mockery of the sacred bloodline of David from which the messiah was to come and the Jews would not stand for that even if they hated Jesus because of the contempt and lack of morale among Jews this desecration would ignite. The real Jesus would not have been nailed with a crown of thorns on his head and a sign above it. The Shroud is lying.
If the Shroud-man was Jesus
then why don’t we have impressive miracles of healing like those which
The man is not Jesus. If we have a miraculous image of a man that is not Jesus then the Shroud is better than the New Testament for it gives scientific proof which is better than mere testimony and this makes it irrational and sinful to uphold Jesus as the Son of God when the evidence for Mr X being the real one is superior.
If there was a dead man in the cloth then somebody added the blood demonstrating that the cloth was some kind of trick for dead men don’t bleed.
The head of the Shroud man is not in a natural position. See X Factor Issue 31, Marshall Cavendish, 1997 pages 858 and 859 which provides evidence that the head was cut off. It states that computer digitalisation has shown that the image stops at the line on the neck which looks like a slit throat and then starts again in the upper chest so there is no neck or body between them.
I agree for seven reasons that the cloth depicts a decapitated man.
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There is a line across the neck like a cut. If it is a cut, then the blood must have been wiped away for the image was meant to create the impression that it was of Jesus.
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The back image is 2.7 meters in height while the front is 2.2 meters. The back image then is a complete image. A body was put on the front without a head. And a head was put on after. A separate head was used. The head image was perhaps made more elongated in an attempt to make the body the same height as the back image. The wrong head would change the height of the man in the front image. The front image of the Shroud is a composite image.
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The body is too big and muscular for such a gaunt and skinny head.
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The hair frames the face contradicting the evidence from the rest of the shroud that it is the image of a man lying down. The head is separate from the body but only for the front image.
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The body has a lot of blood flowing even from small cuts. The head has most of the small cuts though the head has the most wounds for it looks as if the man wore a cap of thorns. Yet the head doesn’t show enough blood to match the body.
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The man was alive not dead because of this bleeding and yet there is nothing to indicate that his breath distorted the image where the mouth is, the mouth is plain and undistorted and among the sharpest images on the cloth. The head doesn’t belong to the body. The blood put on it was planted deliberately.
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The face image is sharper than the rest of the body so it was separate from the body.
No matter who the body belongs to, the face is not the face of Christ.
Christians will come up with guesses to dismiss these seven facts but it is easier to believe the head is separate and that is what we should believe. Remember, too many rationalisations and speculations to defend something show that the belief is dodgy and that the people doing this are people to be watched for they want to deceive others and themselves.
The head seems to have been cut off and experts like Isabel Piczek, a leading expert on the Shroud man and an artist, despite their abhorrence of this fact admit it is a fact (page 265, The Divine Deception). We know it cannot indicate that Jesus was beheaded because there is no blood unless the blood was wiped away in an attempt to keep the head on by tying a bandage round the neck in an attempt to keep the head with the body. When the man was laid in the tomb there was no need to attach the head but just to line up with the body for he wouldn’t have been moved until he had become a skeleton. The head is too small for the body as the naked eye (Turin Shroud, page 135) and computer analysis (Turin Shroud, page 145) reveal. Some say the head would have been laid in the Shroud first which is why the body lies on top of the hair at the back. There was no need for the bandage then and it probably was only of a little help anyway.
The blackness, in the negative image, at the neck which means the head is not part of the body at all appears sharply unlike the rest of the Shroud image where any blackness or blankness appears gradually (page 260, The Divine Deception). This indicates that the head is indeed separate. Draping is not the reason for the blankness or blackness. The gap makes no sense because the beard looks like it hangs down over it as if the man were standing erect and the start of the neck is seen and then nothing at all so the cloth was indeed touching the neck but no image transferred. The real reason for the gap is because there was a gap and the head of the Shroud man simply was not and never was part of the body. If it had belonged to the body it would be possible to put the head back on and it would look normal. But the neck is too short as well. The head is too small for the body (page 262, The Divine Deception).
Some believe that the head of Jesus was embalmed and this was used to create the face of the Shroud man and that a decapitated body was used for the rest. These people believe that however, though the Shroud does have the face of Jesus on it, it is still a medieval forgery. Others suggest that the head belonged to John the Baptist who actually was beheaded.
SECRETS
OF THE DEAD
In March 2004 and 16th April 2006, the British Television channel, Channel 4, aired a documentary for Secrets of the Dead series on the Turin Shroud titled Shroud of Christ?.
Nicholas Leigh Allen was the only sceptic who was given a hearing. He argued that if there could be silver found on the Shroud it would indicate that it is a medieval photograph.
Mechthild Flury-Lemberg claimed
that the weave of the Shroud which is the three to one herringbone pattern
meant a cloth of great quality in ancient times and that the same pattern is
found on a 12th century picture indicating that the artist knew
the Shroud. She saw the stitching
pattern in which a piece of the same material was attached on to one of the
long sides of the cloth. She says it
is surprisingly similar to the hem of a cloth found in the tombs of the
Jewish fortress at
Here are my observations.
So the stitching is similar not the same. Interesting.
Why did the Shroud need a bit
to be sewn on to it when it was so professionally made? How could professionals make such a
mistake? Did somebody do research in
The pattern used to weave the Shroud was wrinkle and curl free and makes the cloth long lasting (page 16, The Turin Shroud is Genuine). This may indicate that the image was forged for this weave might have been chosen so that the image could be displayed for a long long time.
The programme says the Hungarian codex from 1192-5 AD before the time the carbon dating says the shroud cloth was made depicts a cloth with the same weave as the shroud. From this its said that the dating must be wrong for the Shroud must have been seen by the artist who made the picture in the codex.
The picture has two parts, a
picture above and a picture below. The
picture above shows Jesus lying on a Shroud that is too short to be the
The lid of the sarcophagus is
what has the herringbone pattern and the poker holes and there is a slab
below it which has the poker holes as well.
This strongly suggests that whoever created the Shroud MISUNDERSTOOD
the picture or MISREMEMBERED it. It
certainly does not suggest that the Shroud was known in those days. Overall the picture refutes the Shroud and
with so many imaginary pictures of the Shroud from the period you wouldn’t be
surprised for at least one to have some similarities with the
If the carbon dating is right
that the Shroud is a medieval fake, then the herringbone pattern was well
known before the Shroud was forged as the artist’s work shows. It is too much to believe that this artist
knew of the Shroud when nobody else seems to have known of it. It is more likely that he was the
inspiration for the Shroud or that he knew of the pattern from people who had
been to
The water stains on the Shroud apparently can show that the Shroud was folded into many sections and put into a jar of the style used in the first century. Water leaked in and stained one corner of the bundle leaving patches of stain when the Shroud was unfolded. This effect has been successfully replicated. But the cloth should have rotted and moulded where the water stained it. The water was in contact a long time. Either the water contained some chemical that made it stain faster meaning the cloth was forged and it may have been an ingredient or the water is a miracle! But the cloth in the jar is only a hypothesis anyway.
The program went too far in saying that the blood on the Shroud was the same rare blood type as that of the Sudarium of Oviedo, the cloth that was allegedly put over Jesus’ head after he expired. The Shroud blood would have been contaminated by the DNA and biological matter and cells of the many people who handled it over the years.
The Sudarium is a cloth that has been kept in
Examining the head and arm of the Shroud man shows no evidence that his bloodstained head was stuck to his upper arm.
The Jews believed the soul was in the blood and they collected the blood of a man who died violently so the Sudarium cloth had this purpose. There is evidence that the blood on the Sudarium came out and stopped and came out again a number of times. How could a man that was dead and in rigor mortis still bleed? The Sudarium is a fake or not a relic of Jesus at all.
The Sudarium and the Shroud are supposed to have the
same blood type, the rare blood group AB.
But it has been shown that 7% of people in
The forensic experts who said that the Sudarium shows it must have been on the face of a person with Semitic features are talking nonsense for anybody could look Jewish and it is only their opinion. Other experts would either say it cannot be known what race the person was or even that it was somebody of a different race. Plus the stains would have been disturbed and the cloth moved as the body moved as it was removed from the cross so that you can’t read much into their position. You certainly cannot be sure that the nose size was and yet some say they can and it is the same size as the Shroud man’s nose. Where are the hairs on the Sudarium and on the Shroud that should be there? Why did none of Jesus’ hairs come out and stick to the Shroud in the blood? There are none for both relics are fake. Sadly, this prevents DNA testing to tell us about who the cloths covered if anybody.
The believers in the shroud and the sudarium talk so much shite that it is enough to turn one off religion forever. A nice proof that the fantasies and lies that they put forward as evidences for the Shroud and the Sudarium being real is that the Sudarium has been carbon dated to about 695 AD fairly close to the time it first appeared in Oviedo (page 209, The Jesus Relics, From the Holy Grail to the Turin Shroud). And as usual, the believers are trying to discredit the carbon dating just as they tried with the dating of the Turin Shroud. They tell lie after lie and none of them agree on why the dating should be discredited. They usually say that we don't know how the cloth was kept in centuries gone by so we don't know how much contamination it got! Speculation. It is as clean as you would expect!
If the Sudarium and the Shroud are related and touched the same dead man as these "experts" say, then clearly both did not come from the time of Jesus Christ.
The Sudarium, if really a relic of Jesus, refutes the Shroud for these reasons:
§ If they could not move the man’s head it was because rigor mortis had set in rapidly. Then how did they get the man so relaxed looking as in the Turin Shroud? His neck is straight.
§ The blood on the Sudarium came out and dried and then fresh blood came out creating a large layered pattern of blood. This means the man was not dead at all. Blood came out from the nose area. The Shroud man does not show any signs of a great nose bleed. Like the Shroud, the Sudarium perhaps seeks to undermine the view that Jesus died on the cross.
§ There is no evidence and it is doubtful that the Romans would have let the friends of Jesus climb up on the cross to attach a cloth to his head. Why would they want to? The blood was still going to be on his head when they would bring him down from the cross. If the Sudarium and the Shroud come from the same man then the Shroud is a fake.
§ The Shroud man shows no evidence that his head was held in the Sudarium. The blood round the nose area of the Sudarium would mean that the Shroud man should have had a big smear in the middle of his face. But there is nothing.
§ Where are the holes that the thorns would have poked in the cloth? Where are the scratches? The Shroud man bled fresh from the thorn wounds indicating the crown had just been pulled off before he was laid in the cloth. So the Sudarium says Jesus had no thorns on while he was on the cross and the Shroud says he had.
§ The man’s head was resting tight against his arm. Then why is there no evidence of deep wounds from the thorns on the Shroud man’s arm that you would expect if he rested his head against his arm when he died? The man would be most inclined to bow down his head.
§ The Sudarium does not have marks like a crown of thorns for the front so it is not the facecloth of the Shroud man who does have a lot of these marks at the front (page 254-5, The Divine Deception).
§ The research of Dr Villalain who managed to simulate the staining of the sudarium has the victim bleeding from the nose after he was an hour dead! Some dead man this and yet there is no sign of respiration on the cloth meaning it is a dud (page 250, The Divine Deception). The Shroud man supposedly has his nose broken corresponding to Jesus who had been beaten around the face hours before the crucifixion. There would have been a lot of bleeding from the nose had this been true. It would have already clotted so nothing would be able to come out after death.
§ The Sudarium did not come from a bearded man. The matted moustache and beard should have left their marks but didn’t. The Shroud man was bearded and so he was not Jesus if the Sudarium is genuine. The programme says there were signs of a beard but this is unconvincing because there should have been a great deal of blood collecting in the moustache and beard.
Stephen J Mattingly who is Professor of Microbiology and
Immunology at the
This experimentation does not lead us to the conclusion he wants us to take. Did somebody experimenting with dead bodies and linen discover this effect? If so, he could have mixed the bacteria and cells with paint and painted an image on the cloth. As the paint faded away the other image was left behind. Forgery is still the most plausible answer because if there had been a body in the cloth there should have been distortion in the image.
In his experiments, Mattingly, puts the biofilm or the “glue” on his hand and then the cloth sticks to it. This would mean there should be smudging on the Shroud as the body was being moved inside it, it should have been sticking here and there and leaving traces. The image is just too good to be true. Another problem is that Mattingly finds the hand the best to use for it is skin and bone and faces don’t come out right for they have fat and muscle. He argues that since the Shroud man’s face came out clear he must have been skin and bone. He explains this by saying the man lost his muscle mass by dehydration and the loss of blood. If that is true the man is not Jesus Christ. Why did the man keep his bulk elsewhere? His chest is defined and muscular. And Jesus was not suffering long enough for his face to change so it seems the Shroud man had been starved and tortured for days and had nothing to drink but this contradicts the good condition of his body. The body and the face cannot belong to the same person.
Even more importantly, if the Shroud man was washed before he was put in the Shroud then he couldn’t have been dead when he started bleeding again inside the cloth.
The programme is biased and unprofessional. It is terrible to use experts who exploit their aura of authority rather than the facts to get people to accept their thesis, namely that the Turin Shroud is the winding sheet of Jesus Christ!
A CATHOLIC TRUTH
SOCIETY BOOKLET REVIEWED
The Burial Cloths of Christ,
written by top Spanish syndologist Mark Guscin, this booklet claiming that
the Sudarium and the Turin Shroud are both authentic, was published by
It begins by saying that the Sudarium was referred to in John’s gospel. The booklet assumes that the cloth that was around the head that is mentioned there was the Sudarium. This is extremely unlikely because the Sudarium was put around the head of the man on the cross. Why would it be buried? John would have specified what cloth it was had it been that cloth for the Jewish custom was that the dead be buried with the face bare and a cloth over it. When he was not specific he was indicating that Jesus was buried according to this custom.
Page 6 dismisses the Carbon dating by saying that the tests do not show that the cloth was from the 14th Century but only that the amount of Carbon 14 in the cloth is compatible with a 14th Century origin. This is a distortion as you can see from the allegation that the laboratories that stick to the dating don’t want to open their eyes – this is bringing in the conspiracy theory that all fundamentalist believers like to use when they seek to obstruct evidence that contradicts their suppositions. The booklet says the bioplastic coating made the dating come out wrong and the effect of this coating was not known in 1988 so what would the laboratory have to gain by being so unscientific and unprofessional that they would stand by a dubious dating test? There are countless indications that the Shroud is not the winding sheet of Jesus so there is nothing to be frightened of if the cloth does turn out to be first century. The booklet says that if you are being scientific you will not believe one test that says the cloth is forged when other tests indicate authenticity (page 8). But the carbon dating test is the most important test of all for it is the only one with the hope of settling the question once and for all which the others can’t do beyond all probable doubt.
Page 14-15 says that Leandro who died about 595 AD mentioned the imprint of the risen Lord on Jesus’ burial cloths. But it says this was in the Mozarabic Liturgy which he PROBABLY wrote and then it was only a part if he did. We can dismiss that evidence for it is only speculation. The legend of the Veronica, a cloth with the print of Christ’s face on it, would have inspired this legend that there were images on Jesus’ burial cloths. There were so many legends that are now dismissed as nonsense from Leandro’s time so why should we pay any attention to what he supposedly wrote?
Page 22-23, informs us that
Braulio bishop of
What the booklet chooses to ignore is that Taius, a top cleric who succeeded Braulio as bishop, believed that relics of Christ’s blood were fake because he thought all blood returns to the body at the resurrection. Why listen to Braulio and not Taius who we must remember reflected the rigid fundamentalist consensus that came close to having the resurrection as really just a resuscitation of the corpse? Most people would have agreed with Taius. There was no such thing as anybody verifying the blood relics from ancient sources and coming to a belief like that of Braulio who we must remember made no effort to authenticate the relics he said were real and showed no competence in judging them.
Page 23 goes into desperation when it says that a picture, really a kind of cartoon, from the twelfth century depicting the Mandylion shows the Emperor trying to kiss the face on the cloth which detaches itself from the cloth as if to meet his face and the cloth is depicted as too big for the face. The booklet concludes that the Mandylion must have indeed been the Turin Shroud for it was a cloth a body could have been wrapped in. This is rubbish for the image coming from the cloth is only a face and the picture is only symbolic when the face detaches itself from the cloth so we cannot take it as a scientific depiction of the cloth. Its not relevant.
The equally irrelevant Hungarian Codex gets a mention later.
Copies of the Shroud were painted with the poker holes shown as red bloodstains! This was because there is blood in the area where the holes are (page 26) in the actual shroud. This is all so strange for the holes were made by a poker being thrust through the Shroud when it was folded. It is a strange coincidence that the poker holes should have the redness of blood and may suggest forgery because it is just too convenient. It is as if heat was used to put the “blood” on the cloth.
Page 78 says that there is some paint on the Shroud but that it probably came from painted copies being laid on the cloth. But would any artist have been allowed to place an image on the cloth that could dirty it? Isn’t the usual practice among Catholics just to touch a part of cloth against a relic? It is grotesque and mistaken to imagine that the people looking after the cloth were going to spread it out and it being so fragile so that a copy could be laid out on it. And none of the copies were marketed as relics which is significant. The paint on the Shroud indicates that somebody was trying to paint on it.
Page 32 admits that the miracle of the 3-D aspect of the cloth comes from a photo of it and not the actual cloth! It says the blood was put on before the image for there is no image behind the blood. Yet after this the booklet goes on to defend the insane Collapse Theory which argues that the image was formed because Jesus’ body slowly dematerialised in the cloth and the cloth sank down slowly through it leaving a print. If the theory were true there would be an image behind the blood. Also the neck would show up. The image would not have the shadows it has had it been created this way. And when all is said and done, the theory exaggerates the blood stains being in the wrong place. In fact they are still too accurate to have been really caused by a body. For example, the head blood stains should be wider of the head. Try this at home with hair dye, if you wrap a towel around your hair shroud style the mark will be much wider than your head because the cloth has to go around and pick up the stains. The theory is really just an excuse for explaining how the image doesn’t distort.
The booklet argues then that
the image was made by a miracle. If
true then the Shroud is proof that very strong psychokinesis is
possible. Psychokinesis, a form of
PSI, is the alleged power of thought to change matter at a distance. A growing number of Catholic theologians
and investigators of miracles are saying that PSI is what causes many
miracles. They want to get away from
the idea that a miracle must be proven to be against nature to be true and
they want to move to the idea that since God causes all things and if we do a
miracle by mind-power and the miracle is good for us and comforting and
spiritually healthy then it should be recognised as a sign from God. The trouble with this view is that is makes
miracles signs for a benevolence in humanity, there would be no need to bring
God into it at all. If psychokinesis exists
then even if the Turin Shroud is a miracle then there is still no reason to
believe it is the burial cloth of Christ.
Maybe the apostles made it by mind-power. It would seem to be the case that if Jesus
was dead then his psychokinesis was not involved but somebody else’s. If you want to read about miracles and the
link with PSI then please read Apparitions, Healings and Weeping Madonnas, by
Lisa Schwebel, Paulist Press,
PSI, if it exists, does some strange miracles like making images. There are images that are even harder to explain than the Turin Shroud like images of faces appearing on the floors of houses and the image of Guadalupe which contradicts the divine origin of the Bible by calling on men to make a goddess of Mary. Its all confusion and contradiction. By no means should the Turin Shroud be taken as proof for Jesus even if it is a miracle. In fact, all the attention it gets is unjust and quite vulgar when you realise that.
Incredibly and absurdly the booklet tells us that the Sudarium with its bloodstains and dirt was used as a headdress during early Church ceremonies! And nobody is disturbed that the blood on the Sudarium is brown and black while that on the Shroud is red! Or by the fact that the thorn wounds on the cloth as depicted in the booklet (page 47) only run for a few inches when they should make a big circle! And Jesus was buried in a hurry so what would they bother with a Sudarium for?
THE
HINNOM SHROUD
The
Jesus was allegedly wrapped
in the Shroud of
Conclusion
The Shroud man is not Jesus Christ.
BOOKS CONSULTED
Ante-Nicene Christian Library, Roberts and Donaldson, T&T Clark, Edinburgh, 1870
Biblical Exegesis and Church Doctrine, Raymond E Brown,
Paulist Press,
Free Inquiry, Spring 1998, Vol
18, No 2, Article by Joe Nickell, Council for Secular Humanism,
From Fasting Saints to Anorexic
Girls, Walter Vandereycken and Ron van Deth, Athlone Press,
Holy Faces, Secret Places, Ian
Wilson, Corgi,
Inquest on the Shroud of
Jesus Lived in
Looking for a Miracle, Joe
Nickell, Prometheus Books,
Miracles, Ronald A Knox, Catholic Truth Society,
Sceptical Inquirer 9/10 2001
Vol 25, No 5, Article by Joe Nickell, CSIOCP,
Relics, The Society for Irish
Church Missions, Bachelor’s Walk,
The Blood and The Shroud, Ian
Wilson, Orion,
The Book of Miracles, Stuart Gordon, Headline,
The Divine Deception, Keith
Laidler, Headline,
The DNA of God?, Leoncio A Garza-Valdes, Doubleday, 1999
The Holy Shroud and Four Visions, Rev Patrick O Connell
and Rev Charles Carty, TAN,
The Holy Shroud and the Visions of Maria Valtorta, Msgr
Vincenzo Celli, Kolbe Publications Inc.,
The Image on the Shroud, Nello
Ballosino, St Paul’s,
The Jesus Conspiracy, Holger
Kersten amd Elmar R Gruber, Element,
The Jesus Relics, From the Holy Grail to the Turin Shroud, Joe Nickell, The History Press, Gloucestershire, 2008
The
Pagan Christ, Tom Harpur, Thomas Allen Publishers,
The Second Messiah, Christopher
Knight and Robert Lomas, Arrow,
The Skeptic’s Guide to the Paranormal, Lynne Kelly,
The Shroud, The 2000 Year Old Mystery Solved, Ian Wilson, Bantam Press, London, 2010
The Turin Shroud is Genuine, Rodney Hoare, Souvenir Press,
The
The Unauthorized Version, Robin Lane Fox, Penguin, Middlesex, 1992
Verdict on the Shroud, Kenneth
E Stevenson and Gary R Habermas, Servant Publications, Ann Arbour,
Sunday, 09 September 2007